The concept “Open Process Clouds” has nothing to do with cloud computing, but rather parts of a process that can not be presented by a traditional process. They use a little cloud symbol in the process definition to denote the ambiguous, unpredictable behavior of what people do there. This is precisely what we have been talking about in ACM as an unpredictable process, but his terminology is a little different.

“many critical business processes lack a predefined process model, but depend upon the experience and expertise of case managers who work with large amounts of unstructured data to make decisions.”

He gave two examples of these:

reinsurance underwriting – an insurance company will transfer parts of their risks to another party, and this behavior looks like bargaining. There is no strict sequence of activities, and this is not supported well in workflow manager or BPM.

health insurance rehabilitation – this is a long term control process with many people involved, and it is difficult to say ahead of time exactly what is needed, and depends upon so many details that are not clear from the beginning.

The important thing to notice is that these are not trivial activities, but instead important, critical business operations. Even though these are so valuable, for these business activities it is impractical or impossible to specify fixed interaction patterns. There are a number of different reasons for this:

Either the pattern is too complex or too rarely executed to fix the exact pattern. These business activities happen from time to time, but not on a daily basis. For example in injury rehabilitation something may be needed one day, and then not again for several months.

The business activity may be too interactive, with many people being involved, and we can’t predict the exact timing of when people are available.

The understanding by the expert may be fuzzy and non-algorithmic. The experts know what to do but can not explain it.

In all of these cases, the expert competence and knowledge remain essential for such tasks!

The example in the paper is an injury rehabiitation control process. The first step “generate healing plan” was not really defiend how to do that and so is represented as a little cloud. However, this step is required to generate a “Healing plan”. The second part of the process is to monitor the plan, and again it is impossible to pre-define exactly what has to happen there. After that is completed, an evaluation report is written.

An interesting thing to note is that while the experts have an idea about the artifacts they should produce, and possible the databases they should access, they often don’t know the details about the sequences of action to achieve that. Others interacting with the case don’t care at all about the activities or the order they are done, but do care about the artifacts and structure. This is consistent with the ACM idea that we should be focussing on data and artifacts more than on the process.

Agenda - They propose the term “agenda” for the collection of tasks that need to be done. It is a simple list of goals to be accomplished, and there is nesting to allow sub-goals within goals. Also, there is a required artificat that must be input to this process cloud, as well as the artifacts that will be produced.

“Process clouds do not have a fixed sequence of steps, but usually has some guidance on what should be accomplished.”

Templates – To enable learning and evolution they formed “templates” with proposed artifacts and agenda. It is necessary to ba able to modify the agenda on an instance by instance basis, possibly adding tasks or removing tasks to fit the specific case. They also have the opportunity for a case manager to start with a “clean slate” which is simply an empty list from not using a template. Also, they have a way for a case manager to “propose” a template for next time they do this again, that is, correcting what they felt was a mistake so that next time they can do it better.

One of the biggest advantages they see is the accumulation of traces from previous cases. These can be analyzed with process mining techniques, and will give you information to improve the handling of the cases in the future.

Summary: I like this paper because it puts very good words around the issues that the ACM people have been talking about: important business activities can not be modeled and supported with a BPM approach. Instead of a process, they use a very simple concept of an “agenda” which can be modified by the case manager at any time. The focus needs to be more on artifacts, and less on task/process. This is clearly the right idea for knowledge worker cases.

6 Responses to Process Cloud Concept for Case Management

In fact the Case Management is more about the content an a cloud of task around a file/dossier. So the focus is on the dossier on which the responsible case manager is working on the most tasks. The sequence of the tasks depends on the current event and state.
Yes BPMN should be extended with Case Management capabilities!
Best Regards, Martin

The introduction of a cloud to capture process fragments where expert users need some leeway to deal with complex or even unique cases is an interesting idea.

It does seem to imply that they are isolated process areas where ‘anything goes’. Contrary to traditional flow based process management, where all steps are predefined and set by specific rules, process clouds seem to abandon any notion of rules.

In practice, I am afraid, we can not deal with this black and white distinction. Even, or especially, in these expertise based phases of the process, lots of constraints still apply. And although experts are free to deal with exceptions as they see fit to some extent, these constraints need to be enforced all the same.

At the same time, a process-free cloud might be useful in dealing with complex cases, but that flexibility might turn into a serious lack of support in mainstream, ‘easy’ cases.

We might have found the boundaries of what flow based processes can do for us.
Rule based processes are far better suited to allow the expert the flexibility he needs to deal with 20% of complex cases, while they still actively support the processing of the 80% mainstream cases.